Howto: Linux write (burn) data to DVD or DVD/RW

In order to write DVD/DVD-RW from shell prompt you need to install a package called dvd+rw-tools.

DVD is another good option for backup, archiving, data exchange etc. You can install dvd+rw-tools with following commands. Also note that this package works under *BSD, HP-UX, Solaris and other UNIX like operating systems.

How do I write DVD?

You need to use growisofs command, which combined mkisofs frontend/DVD recording program. From growisofs man page, “growisofs was originally designed as a frontend to mkisofs to facilitate appending of data to ISO9660 volumes residing on random-access media such as DVD+RW, DVD-RAM, plain files, hard disk partitions. In the course of development general purpose DVD recording support was implemented, and as of now growisofs supports not only random-access media, but even mastering of multiession DVD media such as DVD+R and DVD-R/-RW. In addition growisofs supports first-/single-session recording of arbitrary pre-mastered image (formatted as UDF, ISO9660 or any other file system, if formatted at all) to all supported DVD media types.”

Since growisofs has an inbuilt functionality that allows to directly pipe mkisofs’s output, it is probably more common that you call it without making an ISO beforehand. Note also that it’s absolutely not needed to format a DVD+RW more than once. You can just write again with the -Z option in later runs. Yes, this is different from CD-RWs.

Since having growisofs make the iso as it burns has already been mentioned here is another tip…

Before you start burning use par2create from par2cmdline (http://parchive.sourceforge.net/) to generate enough par2 recovery blocks to fill any space that is left on the disc. That way if the disc gets damaged later you may be able to recover the lost data.

if the DVD gets damaged, how can you recover the file? Even it’s not only that the file is corrupted. It’s also that you can’t actually read the dvd. The dvd reader woudl go crazy and you wouldn’t be able to copy the damaged file to disk, afaik?

True, the man page for growisofs has more complete info, but I would have never know to look for growisofs without the page. I would not have felt confident in using mkisofs and growisofs together without this example. So I’d like to thank the author for his redundancy. This explanation works for the way I think.

I had a broken(?) DVD RW disc, that NeroLinux isn’t wrote. I run “dvd+rw-format -force=full /dev/dvd ” command on my Gentoo, later I wrote that DVD without any problem! Thaks a lot! :-) (and sorry ma bad English)

Now use the growisofs command to write the ISO onto the DVD: # growisofs -Z /dev/dvd=/tmp/var-www-disk1.iso

This will literally write an iso image into a directory on the DVD, which is probably not what most people want. I used this command: growisofs -Z /dev/sr0=movie.iso and now have a disc with an ISO image, and not an ISO image that was copied litereally on the DVD. Not a lot of use for my DVD player, and the waste of a DVD-R disc. Opps. Oh well.